Photo Galleries
Rain Garden Rehab, Harrisville, 2016
This rain garden on Breed Road in Harrisville was installed 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds. It captures runoff from Breed Road (to the left) and the boat launch parking area (to the right). By cleaning out the inlets, weeding, adding plants and a new layer of mulch, this rehab project increased some of the capacity of the rain garden lost over the years.
A "before" shot of one of the many inlets volunteers cleaned out two years in a row.
Volunteers shoveled out the inlet material including rocks, sand, trash, and cigarette butts. They separated out the rocks to put back in and hauled away the rest.
You can see how much sand and silt was captured in one of the inlets - and that's a good thing. The inlets prevent that material from getting into the rain garden and filling it up leaving less room for water to pool up and soak in. It's important to clean them out occasionally.
We're not going to lie! Cleaning the inlets and weeding rain gardens is hard work done on your hands and knees.
This large rain garden has a number of check dams, which act to slow the water down and allow it to pond up as it moves toward the overflow outlet. The ponding effect allows sediment settling and infiltration. The work crew removed weeds and rebuilt the check dams.
Some of the volunteers, SOAK NH crew members, and SOAK Silver Lake project manager Rick Brackett (in blue) are happy to give this large rain garden new life.
This rain garden recieves flow from both Breed Road (background) and the Stoney Beach parking lot (foreground).
The more help the better!
One of the corner inlets after cleaning and mulching the rain garden.
One aspect of the rehab was adding plants. Assessing which plants are doing well so more of the same can be installed is an excellent rain garden rehab strategy.
There were many happy bees on the rain garden plants!
Bees visiting goldenrod in the Stony Beach rain garden.
As an added bonus, a sediment trap on the boat launch was cleaned out. The sediment trap mid clean-out. You can see how much material it had caught and prevented from entering Silver Lake!
The sediment trap was thoroughly cleaned with shovels and scrapers. This restored it to its full sediment-trapping capacity.
The grates are put back in place on the nice clean sediment trap